Brian Schildt: findx

Brian Schildt is the Chief Relationship Officer of findx, a private, crawler – based search engine, part of the Danish company Privacore. His talk at the European Data Ethics Forum focused on presenting findx and its main characteristics, touched upon topics of transparency and trust and ended with an important announcement.

The talk began with some thoughts on secrets, the need of their existence and the mechanism of sharing them. Brian showed that, in fact, the internet is quite a space for sharing secrets. All combined, online search engines have the key to over 6,236,216,986 secrets.

Findx is one of the search engines that, compared to the majority, does not sell those secrets. Its initial decision to avoid personal data collection represents a delimitation from non-private search engines and it expands to both the apps and the desktop version of the service. In this way, it can be ensured that no data leaves the device when you install the product.

Brian Schildt presented findx as an independent entity, both in technical and economical terms. The projects if privately funded and it controls the ranking of search results on its own, while in the same time building its own index.

Transparency of algorithms is also a very important concept Brian spoke about. Findx will offer, as of the end of 2017, decentralized ranking. This involves the publication of all ranking factors in the search engine and will give users the power to decide what is important when a search result is displayed.

At the end of his presentation, Brian announced that findx’s app is now launched and can be downloaded here. Check it out!